When it comes to on-screen charisma, Rishi Sunak is no Al Pacino, but after the week he’s had, he can authentically channel one of the Hollywood legend’s most treasured lines. With conviction, he can make like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III and hiss: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
For Sunak is desperate to break free of the disastrous recent Tory past, but again and again it grabs him by the ankles and yanks him back. A week that began with hopeful talk of a breakthrough with the European Union has ended back on the booze, cake and serial rule-breaking of Partygate.
That’s thanks in part to a Friday update from the Commons privileges committee, as it released new evidence showing that Boris Johnson’s own officials were struggling to argue that Downing Street lockdown gatherings were within the rules. One aide talked of a “great gaping hole in the PM’s account”.
Cue a great Westminster back and forth. Johnson called the report “surreal” because it had cited the work of Sue Gray, the Whitehall veteran who is set to join Keir Starmer as chief of staff. The committee replied that it had not relied on Gray and had run its own investigation. But that will not quiet the Johnson faction, now in full cry: Jacob Rees-Mogg calls the Gray report a “leftwing stitch-up.” The Daily Mail asks on its front page, “Is this proof the Partygate probe was a Labour plot?”
To answer yes, here’s what you’d have to believe. That Gray ensured the task of investigation fell to her by secretly engineering the recusal of the cabinet secretary Simon Case, the man originally tasked with the Partygate inquiry, presumably by going back in time and installing Case at the Downing Street Christmas get-together that would later require him to step aside.
Indeed, for the Partygate findings to be a cunning Gray-Starmer plot, the mandarin would have had to have wheeled in the suitcase packed with drink, uncorked the bottles and laid out the nibbles – enticing an innocent Johnson and his staff to break lockdown rules they would otherwise have obeyed, all with a view to serving her future Labour boss. It is, shall we say, a bit of a reach.
So we can dismiss the confected outrage of those Tories who might, in truth, be more concerned about the secrets Gray knows thanks to her six years as head of Whitehall’s “department of cover-ups”, the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team. Because it’s not really Labour that is damaged by this appointment, even before you get to the benefit for Starmer of advice from an insider who knows the business of government intimately. It is Sunak who will suffer.
Think of the week the prime minister has had. Monday brought that EU breakthrough over Northern Ireland, the perfect demonstration, Sunak hoped, of the clean break from the Johnson-Truss era he wants to represent, proof that technocratic competence, not flag-waving bluster, gets results. By Thursday, it was back to Partygate. What view voters take of the rights and wrongs of the Gray appointment matters less than that simple fact: we’re talking about, and remembering, the recent Tory past that Sunak yearns to shake off.
And it keeps happening. The middle of the week was consumed with the 100,000 WhatsApp messages of Matt Hancock, the emergence of which provided yet more proof that when it comes to the poorest political judgment in Britain, the former health secretary is the king of the jungle: plenty in Westminster could only marvel at the notion that Hancock thought it wise to trust his deepest secrets to … Isabel Oakeshott.
The Telegraph has used its scoop to advance the lockdown sceptics’ case, but the clearest takeaway is a reminder of the government’s serial failures on Covid, starting with the seeding of the virus among elderly and vulnerable people: now we know that Hancock rejected the advice of the chief medical officer to test all residents going into England’s care homes.
Having Hancock’s face splashed everywhere was bad enough, but Sunak has had to endure the return of Johnson himself. In a speech on Thursday, the former PM pretended to eschew any thoughts of a comeback, demurely insisting it was unlikely he would “need to do anything big in politics again” (and we might linger on that word “need”). But don’t be fooled. When Nadine Dorries suggests that the Gray report is no longer worth the paper it’s written on, and seeks to wave aside the privileges committee’s new evidence, she is doing it to rehabilitate her old patron.
Even if that were not the goal, the mere presence of the former PM undermines the Sunak project to start afresh. Johnson’s words didn’t help either, saying he would struggle to vote for Sunak’s “Windsor framework”, thereby ruining what was meant to be his successor’s first major achievement, offering himself as a focus for Tory and DUP discontent and increasing the chances of the very “Westminster drama” the PM had urged his MPs to avoid.
Sunak wants to do what John Major did in 1990: make voters feel they’ve got a brand new government, so there’s no need to replace it with Labour. But his task is made harder by these daily reminders that the Tories have been in power for 13 years, and have spent much of that time veering between chaos, scandal and calamity.
But there’s one specific reason why Sunak cannot escape that legacy. Because, like Michael Corleone, he is up to his neck in it. He was number two in the government during Covid, adding to the disaster with his ludicrous “eat out to help out” scheme, whose chief achievement was adding to the rate of infection. He stood at Johnson’s side during Partygate, even receiving a fixed-penalty notice of his own. He claims a great victory on Northern Ireland trade, but that is merely solving a problem created by the very government in which he served at the highest level.
This week he was telling the people of Northern Ireland that they were in an “unbelievably special position” of having access to both the UK home market and the EU single market. “Nobody else has that,” he said. And you know why no one else in the UK has that, Prime Minister? Because you took it away from us, with the catastrophic Brexit you voted for and supported.
Sunak laments his inability to escape the Tory past, but it’s too late. Like the scion of the mythic mafia family, he chose his fate long ago – and now it haunts him.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
